Some more thoughts on Green things.   When you start talking about Green and large scale businesses, the topic of Green Data Centers always comes up.   I saw this article on the Globalspec blog about how a single Google search burns about 2-8 Watt-hours of energy, which they estimate to be 1.8 Million KWh/day.   Don’t know where the numbers come from since the article doesn’t cite any sources, but no matter how you look at it, mega data centers go through a lot of energy.

After burning a few Watt-hours on Google myself, I came across this article on “Seven Steps To A Green Data Center”.   A few pages along is the step called  “Break down internal business barriers”

“While IT has carefully tracked performance and uptime, most IT organizations aren’t held accountable for energy efficiency due to the separation of IT functions from the facilities group. The former generates the load, while the latter usually gets the power bill, says Uptime Institute’s Brill. “ …

Now how can you bridge the communication gap between IT guys that understand SNMP, and the facilities guys that understand BACNet and, Johnson Controls?  Hmm….  Maybe OPC?

While I’m on the subject of OPC and energy management, a reminder that ConnectivityWeek 2008 – “Empowering The Energy Revolution” is happening next week (May 20-22^nd).  It includes the two-day IndConn, which focuses on industrial IT and automation and is organized in partnership with the OPC Foundation and Open O&M, so a lot of the topics will center around OPC and OPC UA.